Some people build their dream homes; others come upon them by serendipity. One couple—she's a commercial real-estate appraiser, he a Columbia University urban-planning professor—discovered the house of their dreams while scouring real-estate listings online after looking for a weekend getaway in the rolling hills of Columbia County, New York, for several years. Their full-time residence is a brownstone in Brooklyn, but they wanted more modern surroundings upstate. They found exactly what they were looking for in a minimalist house on eight bucolic acres.

The house is striking in its long, angular lines and muted palette of tough industrial materials: black aluminum siding, translucent polycarbonate cladding and aluminum-framed windows and doors outside; whitewashed drywall and polished-concrete and painted-wood floors inside. "I fell in love with it instantly," recalls the wife.

The previous owners of the home were also its designers: David Leven and Stella Betts, the married partners of the New York City firm Leven Betts Studio Architects. The pair drew inspiration from the site, a former cornfield, and the lines etched into the earth by years of tractor wheels and plow blades. Leven and Betts emphasized those linear markings by dividing the house into two long, conjoined volumes. One contains the kitchen, bathrooms and laundry room (neatly ganging together all the home's plumbing), the other a lofty living/dining area and a pair of bedrooms upstairs.

Inside the two-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home, Leven and Betts stuck to a monochromatic palette of white walls (Benjamin Moore's Superwhite), white-tiled bathrooms and painted wood floors in the upstairs bedrooms. (The floors downstairs are polished concrete embedded with radiant heating.) For the architects, whiteness doesn't come from just paint or tiles. "We wanted to play with different levels of glow and different degrees of shine," says Betts. "So there are whites that are opaque, translucent and transparent, and surfaces that are matte, semigloss and glossy."

There's a mix of white tones and textures in every room, especially the kitchen—"a great place to cook," says the wife, who frequents Columbia County's plentiful farm stands and organic farmers' markets. A 20-foot-long Corian-wrapped island, inspired by the boxy sculptures of famed minimalist artist Donald Judd, floats in front of a wall of semigloss painted cabinets.

Above the counter, the frosted-acrylic treads of a second-floor staircase admit natural light from a skylight, adding to the kitchen's brightness. The bedrooms also glow with daylight softly filtered through polycarbonate walls and reflected off white floors and walls. "It's like being in a cloud," says Betts. "Creating a muted palette for the interior really draws your eye outside."

The owners kept the furnishings muted, too. Aside from brightly colored rugs in the bedrooms, all of the furniture sticks to shades of gray, taupe and, of course, white. The subdued palette lets the changing colors of the landscape become part of the interiors.

During the winter, the black house stands out starkly against snowy hillsides. But inside, the whiteness is amplified by the snow. "Last year, I was watching the first snowfall of the season," recalls the wife. "I could see the storm approaching, and suddenly it enveloped the house. It was like being inside a snow globe."

Even in the tough upstate New York winters, the abundant windows and sliding glass doors make for intimate connections between indoors and out. "Every room has a different view, and they're all nice. You can see the moon and stars and sunrise and sunset," enthuses the wife. "The focus is not just in one direction." The walls of milky-white translucent panels have sections of operable clear-glass windows to access the view—and to help cool the house, which is not air-conditioned, in summer.

Though their home is architecturally tough, the owners find it cozy and comforting. "We've hosted friends and family, but for the most part we come up here to get away. It's a place to relax in, enjoy music and just be together," says the owner about quiet weekends with her husband. She recalls the final lines of a verse by Arizona poet Alberto Ríos, which echo her feelings about the house: "Sometimes in buildings we find/Pieces of the heart./Sometimes in a heart we find/The shelter of a building."

"That's exactly how I feel about our home," says the owner. "It's not just a structure. I have a strong emotional attachment to it."

What the Pros Know

Architects David Leven and Stella Betts are no strangers to white interiors. They work in a white office filled with white desks and chairs, and they have designed several all-white houses. So why the focus on monochrome? "White lets you read the simplicity or the complexity of a space. You pay more attention to the space instead of surfaces," explains partner Stella Betts. "If there are too many things going on, you can't appreciate the room as much." Leven and Betts say white architecture not only creates more evenly reflected light as the light bounces off plain white surfaces, it also amplifies subtle shifts in the intensity and quality of daylight. "There's a nicer quality of light. You can see how light coming in through windows or skylights changes during the day, casting beautiful pools of light on the floor," suggests Betts. "A muted palette lets you see all these things that you otherwise might have missed."